Garage Job Cards Without a Work Order Entity
There is no work order entity here, so a job card is a project. That sounds like a compromise and mostly is not — it gives you parts issued at stamped cost, labour hours and a margin per job. What it does not give you is a vehicle history, and that gap is real.
Ask a Nairobi garage owner what a job made and you will usually get a confident answer that is wrong in a specific direction. The labour is remembered, the parts are approximately remembered, and the small things — the two litres of oil, the clip that broke, the hour someone spent chasing a part across town — are not counted at all. Almost every workshop in this market is more profitable on paper than in the bank, and the difference is those small things.
A job card fixes that, and the mechanics of how it is modelled here are worth understanding before you decide whether it fits your workshop.
The honest structural position
There is no work order entity in this system. A workshop job is modelled as a project, with tasks under it. That is a genuine architectural limitation and it is worth stating before describing what works, because a vendor who describes the workaround without naming it is asking you to discover the naming yourself.
What maps to what
In the workshop In the system
The job card A project, with a budget and a customer
The individual operations Tasks under the project
Parts fitted Stock issued to the project, costed at issue
Labour Time entries against tasks
The vehicle Custom fields on the project or the customer
The vehicle's service history Nothing. This is the gap.
The last two rows are where this stops being a good fit and starts being a workaround. Registration number, make, model and mileage can be captured as custom fields on the project — which means they are recorded and searchable, and they are not a vehicle record with jobs hanging off it.
What the project model genuinely gives you
More than most workshop-specific software at this price, in one respect that matters: the cost of parts issued to a job is stamped at the moment of issue rather than recalculated later.
That sounds like a technicality and it is the difference between a job cost you can defend and one that moves. If material cost were valued at today's weighted average, a job you closed in March would change its margin every time an unrelated purchase shifted the average — so the same job would cost two different amounts depending when you asked. Stamping the cost at issue means a closed job costs the same twice, which is the minimum requirement for job costing to mean anything.
A clutch replacement, fully costed
The consumables line is the one workshops never capture and it is 6% of this job. The chasing time is the one nobody captures anywhere, because it is not billable and nobody logs unbillable time — which is exactly why job margins look better than the month does.
Making it work in a busy workshop
The failure mode is not the software. It is that a mechanic with a car on a lift will not log anything, so the record gets reconstructed at 5pm by somebody who was not there.
Five habits that make job costing survive contact with a workshop
- Parts are issued to the job at the store, not recorded afterwards. Whoever hands over the part records the issue. If parts leave the store on trust and are reconciled later, the reconciliation will not happen and the consumables will never appear at all.
- One job number, written on the physical card and on the car. Chalk on the windscreen. The number is what links a bay to a record, and it has to exist in the physical world or nobody can use it.
- Log labour at the end of each operation, not the end of the day. Two entries of three hours are more accurate than one entry of six, because the second is a memory and the first is an observation.
- Consumables get a standard issue per job type. Do not ask a mechanic to record two litres of oil — set a standard consumable issue for a service and correct it when it is wrong. An approximation that happens beats a precision that does not.
- Close the job deliberately, with the margin visible. The moment of closing is the only moment anybody will look at the number, so make it the moment it is shown.
One thing the system will not enforce
A task can be closed with an unticked checklist and no attachment. So "the work was checked before the job closed" is a discipline in your workshop rather than a gate in the software — if your quality process depends on a sign-off, that sign-off is a habit somebody has to keep, and nothing will stop a job closing without it.
Where the model runs out
Workshop capability, layer by layer
Parts and labour costed to a job
Stock issued at stamped cost, time entries against tasks, and both rolling into the project's actual cost.
A budget against the job
One budget figure per project, compared against actuals. Enough to see a job going wrong while it is still open.
Task dependencies and sequence
Finish-to-start dependencies in relative day offsets. Useful for a rebuild; overkill for a service.
A line-level budget — parts budget versus labour budget
A project holds one budget amount. If you want to compare quoted parts against actual parts separately from labour, that is a spreadsheet beside the system.
A vehicle record with a service history
The central gap. Registration and mileage live as custom fields on each job; nothing accumulates them into "this car's history".
Scheduling bays and mechanics
No resource levelling and no calendar-based scheduling. Which bay and which mechanic is a whiteboard decision.
Payroll cost onto a job
Time entries capture hours and the payslip carries no job reference, so labour cost on a job is a rate you apply rather than the wage actually paid.
Who this fits and who it does not
Good fit
A garage that also sells parts
The strongest case in this cluster. Your store and your workshop are one business and one stock position, and parts issued to a job depleting the same stock you sell over the counter is exactly what a spreadsheet cannot do.
Good fit
A fleet workshop servicing your own vehicles
Cost per job matters more than customer-facing paperwork, and your vehicles are already assets in the register. See fleet workshop stores.
Weak fit
A high-volume quick-service shop
Forty jobs a day of oil changes and tyre fitting does not need project-level costing, and the per-job overhead of creating a project will be resented within a week. Counter sales through POS is the right shape for that work.
Poor fit
A workshop whose value is the vehicle history
If customers return because you know what you did to their car in 2023, the missing vehicle record is not a workaround away. Be honest with yourself about that before buying.
Our take
The project model gives you real job costing — parts at stamped cost, labour hours, margin per job — and it is more than most workshops in this market have. Issue parts at the store rather than reconciling later, set standard consumables per job type, and accept that the vehicle history is a genuine gap rather than a configuration you have not found. If service history is your competitive advantage, weigh that gap before anything else in this cluster.
Cost a job properly, once
Parts issued to the job at cost stamped at issue, labour logged against tasks, a budget you can watch while the job is open — and a plain statement that the vehicle record and bay scheduling are not here.
See plans & pricingFrequently asked questions
Is there a job card or work order feature?
Not as its own entity — there is no work order model. A workshop job is modelled as a project with tasks under it, parts issued to it as stock, and labour captured as time entries against the tasks. That genuinely works for costing a job and it is a workaround rather than a purpose-built job-card system, which is worth knowing before you evaluate it.
How is the cost of parts on a job calculated?
Stamped at the moment of issue rather than recalculated later. This matters more than it sounds: if material cost were valued at today's weighted average, a job closed in March would change its margin whenever an unrelated purchase moved the average, so the same job would cost two different amounts depending when you asked. A closed job has to cost the same twice for job costing to mean anything.
Can we keep a service history per vehicle?
No. There is no vehicle, registration or VIN entity, so registration and mileage are captured as custom fields on each job and nothing accumulates them into that car's history. If customers return to you because you know what you did to their vehicle two years ago, this is the gap to weigh before anything else — it is not a configuration you have not found.
What do workshops most often fail to capture?
Consumables and chasing time. Oil, brake fluid and cleaner are typically 5–7% of a job and never recorded; the hour someone spends finding a part across town is not billable so nobody logs it. Both are why workshop job margins look healthier than the month does. Fix the first with a standard consumable issue per job type rather than by asking a mechanic to record two litres of oil.
Can we schedule bays and mechanics?
No. There is no resource levelling and no calendar-based scheduling — task dependencies exist as finish-to-start relationships in relative day offsets, which suits a rebuild and is overkill for a service. Which bay and which mechanic remains a whiteboard decision.
Does labour cost on a job come from payroll?
No. Time entries capture hours against tasks, and payslips carry no job reference, so labour cost on a job is a rate you apply rather than the wage actually paid. For most workshops an applied rate is the right answer anyway, but it means the job cost and the payroll cost are two separate figures that will not reconcile exactly.
